Rick Santorum and the Conservative War Against Women

Apropos of the wild-animal massacre in Zanesville, Ohio, you should know that my wife and I are fans of something called Fatal Attractions. This is a reality show about idiots that runs on the Animal Planet network. On the show, we meet idiots who keep exotic pets in their homes, much as did the late and decidedly unlamented Terry Thompson. Most of the idiots insist that they have a sort of psychic bond with their animals that keeps the animals from doing them any harm. (In this, I am always reminded of the "ghost dancers," the Sioux who believed that their rituals would make them impervious to bullets. They were wrong.) In the second half of every episode, we occasionally meet the idiot's idiot children, and bad things begin to happen to the idiot children. One of the idiot children ends up being chewed or mauled or constricted because the animal does what comes naturally to it. (One idiot also ends up battered by his pet whitetail buck which, we are told, turns during the mating season into "a testosterone-fueled missile." Zowie.) Where the idiot sees "a psychic bond," the animal generally sees "lunch." Remarkably, many of these accounts begin with the idiot children using the phrase, "Well, a few of us were sitting around, having a few beers..." At that point, any sensible human being watching is rooting like crazy against his own species. Fat, drunk, and prey is no way to go through life, son.

Which reminds me that the Republicans are once again fully on the offensive against American women and what they do with their lady parts without asking the permission of Jesus or Rick Santorum.

Of all the species in liberaldom, the one that often seems the most pathetic are those people seeking "common ground" with those good-hearted Christian souls on the other side of the abortion issue. This is the grandest of the grand-bargain myths — good-faith attempts from the nominally pro-choice side generally get smacked into the fifth row of the bleachers by the other side — because what's at the bottom of the issue isn't really abortion. That's the gateway issue, used in the same way that the anti-abortion side invented the non-scientific term "partial-birth" abortion to demonstrate that they could get banned a procedure that American women had the constitutional right to obtain. The issue is also about contraception, as we shall see, but that's not really the basic issue, either. The issue is control. A lot of the resistance to allowing women to control their own reproductive lives is rooted in religion, but a lot of it is simple old secular misogyny gussied up with Scripture, and there's no grand bargain on that to be had. (To be accurate, there are a lot of testosterone-fueled missiles who are simply responding to the fact that they have invisible people playing Freudian handball in their noggins.) One side of the argument is playing a much longer game, and it's one in which we all have skin, whether we have ovaries or not.

(And let us dispense with the litmus-test canard right now. Senator Harry Reid, the leader of the Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate, is an anti-abortion politician. Please show me the Republican of equal power and influence who is pro-choice. Clock's tickin'.)

That's because, at its most basic level, the controversy isn't even about misogyny and the control of women's reproductive lives. The real target isn't Roe v. Wade, as effective as the assault on it has been. The real target is Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 Supreme Court decision that established a federal right to privacy. Now, it's true that the issue in Griswold happened to be the right to obtain and to use contraception in your home without the government interfering with you. However, it has long been a tenet of conservative thought that the right to privacy that the Court derived in Griswold is a legal fiction. ("Strict constructionist" judges swear an oath to that every morning over breakfast, I swear, and Mitt Romney's new legal advisor, the career crank Robert Bork, always has been positively eloquent in his frothing on the topic.) Do away with the right to privacy, and there's a whole lot more than a woman's right to choose that goes up for grabs. There is wiretapping, and warrantless searches, and meddling in your private finances, and a bag of "anti-terror" constitutional horrors we probably haven't even imagined yet — although, I guarantee you, some sharp young conservative Republican lawyer has.

So, it begins with Rick Santorum, who is not a cute young feller running a cute little campaign for president, but a dedicated theocratic loon, sitting down yesterday and telling us why he is opposed not merely to abortion, which would surprise nobody, but to contraception as well. He says:

"One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country. It's not okay. It's a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be."

Read that quote carefully. Because, sooner or later, Senator Don't Google Me, Man is going to realize that he's lined up against the vast majority of the American people. At which point, he inevitably will start crawfishing about how he's only concerned about the health dangers to women of the various contraceptive techniques. That is not what he is saying here. What he is saying here is that the use of contraceptives is a danger, worthy of government intervention, in and of itself. It is "counter to how things are supposed to be." According to whom, exactly? Rick Santorum? The late Pope Paul VI? The even later Onan? Precisely what federal action would President Santorum take to counter these dangers? Would his Department of Justice join in a suit that would overturn Griswold on those grounds? It would be nice if, during one of the upcoming 922 GOP presidential debates, someone would ask him about that.

It would also be nice if someone would bring up the latest chicanery from old friend of the blog Jim DeMint, Republican senator from South Carolina and key conservative power broker. Yesterday, DeMint got his mitts on a banal appropriations bill and wedged into it a provision that would make it illegal for a woman and her doctor to discuss abortion over the Internet or "through videoconferencing." Leaving aside the obvious assault on the constitutional right to choose, this is a considerable whack at the First Amendment. If the government, which Jim DeMint is convinced is too big and too intrusive, can segregate this issue into a kind of one-topic Skype, then why can't it do the same to any issue? Why not defense policy, or school reform, or what a vicious, know-nothing yahoo Jim DeMint is, to name only the most obvious examples. Again, maybe this should come up at one of the debates.

It's past cliche now to say that an attack on the rights of one person, or one group, is an attack on the rights over everyone, but it's only a cliche because it's true. We all have a stake in not allowing the people who are so noisy about abortion to win the longer game they're playing against the other freedoms that exist far from the examining rooms and the clinic doors. That's the part that the grand bargainers refuse to understand. Sooner or later, the tiger gets hungry again, and there's a testosterone-fueled missile out there with your name on it.

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